


Doloroso

by Faint_Harlot



Series: Equilibrium [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Inspired by Music, Love, Post-War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:35:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faint_Harlot/pseuds/Faint_Harlot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You can’t hear that? Pain echoing in the plunks of keys? Moving from black to white and back again, until it all melts into grey? That’s our story, Sasuke-kun."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doloroso

**Author's Note:**

> All works in this series are post Chapter 632 and post-war. Exploring friendship, love, loss, Rookie 9, and rebuilding in the aftermath, as well as forgiving one another. In this drabble: SasuSaku. A lot of it. Cliffhanger.

He barely feels his coat lifted from his shoulders. 

In the dimness, glittering green eyes have sought him, pinned him, trapped him. They beckon and drolly tease; indeed, the rouge corner of her lip crinkles into a grin. Then just as fleeting, seeming almost bored, her gaze slides to her right to watch the man at the piano and his female companion, making sweet stories with her saxophone.

How she does this from across a mildly crowded room, he is unsure. Part of him is convinced the _medicine_ she administers is affecting him, somehow. Her skills have come so far and it’s frightening, not that he will discuss it. Gentleness abounds, particularly with him, but his cynical slips of the tongue have earned him a few accidental broken ribs and fingers. 

Half a glass of red wine goes by before the silence breaks – carefully, a ballpoint hammer and chisel in hand, chipping off one stubborn piece at a time. “What did you do with him?”

Slowly turning her attention away from the somber piano player and his saxophone partner, she quickly takes a gulp of wine. Murmuring into the glass, her soft and abashed tones would be masked to the plain, ordinary listener. Not him, though; he hears everything she says.

When she sighs, when she sleeps.

“ . . . Ino and Hina can take care of it.”

He raises an eyebrow: _Pushed him off on another date?_

“It can’t hurt,” she amends, draining the rest of the dry red. On cue and without announcement, the sommelier steps into their comfortable silence and decants another glass. Flowing, rolling unto itself, disturbed only by the curves of a constraining and wide bit of appropriate stemware. 

He burns a dark gaze into the side of her face, unreasonably curious of the attention she offers the music, and not him. But as he continues to observe, her nostrils flare. Knuckles whiten. Small chest cavity swells with a breath held. Tears emerge on her eyelashes. 

“Sakura.”

Without turning, she says,

“You can’t hear that? Pain echoing in the plunks of keys? Moving from black to white and back again, until it all melts into grey?”

Her inhale is slow; the exhale, even more so. 

“That’s our story, Sasuke-kun.”

Watching the performers and their pained expressions, the way their languid but deft fingers weave a tale that, at this very moment, is being recorded on a thousand rolls of parchment. A hundred witness accounts. A handful of nightmares. Bodies succumb to the melodies being whispered in the streets and bars, in the back rows of public councils and from parents to children around the dinner table, in the dead of night. The instruments have hearts and lungs, veins and vessels, bound to their skin and outer shells. The music plays _them_. 

He almost believes it might be true.

She rises from the table. He begins to follow, but her green eyes now snap to attention, rooting him in his seat. Taking a hint, he lowers himself into the plush chair and tries to shake off her stare. A waiter appears from nowhere to delicately perch her coat on sharp, tired shoulders. Fades away, as if existence is questionable. She walks to him, hovers above him, laying her hand against his face. 

He sees the folded scrap of paper tucked underneath his wine glass. Frowns.

“Sakura—”

And then she kisses him; softly, vulnerably, split open with a hollow center. Heat sears across his cheeks, dives underneath his collar to leave his neck burning. Layers and layers of skin simmering and on fire for reasons he has never imagined or allowed. The last time the hammer drops it splits him open and his insides come flooding out to pool at her feet. It is dizzying. Regret, anguish. Precisely what he cannot show her, should not show her. It’s rising above her small ankles in a swift current. Like she expects, it drowns her. 

Like he would never expect, it does not bring about the end of the world. Contrarily, it could let him begin again. 

_We could be … whole._

She pulls away. 

Shaking, she holds him in place with a single finger pressing on his sternum. He forgets her strength. In confusion, he reaches for her, the pads of his fingers burning and now he is frustrated and angry, irrationally so. Eyelids falling closed, her last words are barely above a whisper, lost in the closing notes of a quite unorthodox chapter of history. 

“And isn’t it so sad?”

In the final reverberation of piano wire, he does not hear her leave.

A dying fire, he is left to smolder.


End file.
